Effectiveness of Aircraft Inter-Arrival Control in Upstream Traffic Flow via a Combined Tandem Fluid Queue Model and Integer Programming Approach

Conventionally, several studies indicated that controlling aircraft arrival time in the en-route airspace mitigates arrival aircraft congestion in the terminal airspace. Further research is required to clarify how to leverage this idea to design an air traffic management system, a so-called Extended Arrival MANager (E-AMAN), to reduce the arrival traffic flow while assisting air traffic controllers and boosting their effectiveness quantitatively. Under these circumstances, this research proposed aircraft inter-arrival time control within the en-route airspace and clarified its effectiveness in reducing arrival delay based on mathematical modeling and simulation evaluations. In this paper, we developed the
$G_{t}/GI/s_{t}+GI$
tandem fluid model to analyze the time-varying delay time of flights in both en-route and terminal airspace and demonstrated the effect of inter-arrival time control in the upstream arrival traffic flow in the en-route airspace, combining the model with the nonlinear integer programming problem. The calculation results for 3,074 aircraft over 21 days, arriving at Tokyo International Airport between 17:00 and 22:00, show the possibility for the control to reduce the mean and maximum delay time for flights by 18.8% (5.0 s) and 16.5% (37.6 s) on average within the en-route airspace. Moreover, fast-time simulation by AirTOP is conducted to validate the control, revealing the scope to reduce mean and maximum delay times in the terminal airspace by 11.5% (36.5 s) and 19.2% (148.8 s) on average.